President Biden plans to warn congressional leaders next week against a default, with the White House on Tuesday holding firm that it won’t negotiate any spending cuts related to a debt limit deal.
“The president has been very clear: He’s not going to negotiate about avoiding default. This is Congress’s Constitutional duty,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.
The day after Biden invited Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and congressional leaders back to the White House for a May 9 meeting, Jean-Pierre repeatedly stressed the line she’s touted for weeks, saying that “Congress must act” when it comes to the debt ceiling.
At times short on details of what the White House would like that to entail, Jean-Pierre did appear to leave some room for the possibility of supporting a short-term suspension or extension as a way to avoid a default but said she “won’t negotiate in public on any of this.”
“What I’m going to say is we’ve been very clear, it needs to be done without conditions,” she said. “They need to take action; Congress needs to act, and that’s what the president will continue to make clear, even in the meeting next week.”
Jean-Pierre continued to put all responsibility for the matter on Congress, sidestepping a question on whether there is any executive action the president could take to avoid a default.
Jean-Pierre said that the White House was aware of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s plans to release a letter Monday identifying June 1 as a drop-dead deadline for the debt ceiling. Shortly after the letter was published, reports surfaced that Biden was calling congressional leaders for a White House meeting next week.
McCarthy has accepted the invitation after spending weeks criticizing Biden for refusing to speak to him on the matter. Biden’s invite to McCarthy was an abrupt shift after the White House insisted last week they had no plans to call the Speaker.
Jean-Pierre wouldn’t specify when the president decided to offer the meeting, but said it was after the administration analyzed a Republican-approved debt ceiling plan to raise the borrowing limit and implement sweeping spending cuts. The White House does not support pairing the two.
Instead, Jean-Pierre said, Biden will continue to stress having separate conversations involving budget negotiations with McCarthy and other leaders.
The president and McCarthy last met Feb. 1. Biden has demanded a clean bill to raise the debt limit and has punted the issue of the default to Republicans, arguing that it will be their fault if the deadline is reached.
Jean-Pierre said Tuesday that Yellen’s projection that the nation would default after June 1 “should be a wakeup call to Congress.”
Her comments came shortly after it was revealed that House Democrats had a secret plan to force a vote on a debt limit increase, a long-shot gambit known as a discharge petition that forces floor action on legislation that’s backed by a majority of House lawmakers. Jean-Pierre would not comment on where the White House stands on the House Democrat plan.
Source: The Hill